Thanks Johnson, nice video. America has such a Star Trek myth, and cancelling the shuttle program creates a sort of loss of meaning and purpose for a people who have been expanding into new frontiers since Plymouth Rock. My view is that the real next frontier is the ocean, as a way to fix our planet before colonizing space.

This introductory text was spoken at the beginning of many Star Trek television episodes and films:

Space: The final frontierThese are the voyages of the Starship, EnterpriseIts 5 year missionTo explore strange new worldsTo seek out new life and new civilizationsTo boldly go where no man has gone before

The immense distance to the stars in the galaxies means that we see everything in space, in the past.

Some as they were before the earth came to be.

Telescopes are time machines.

Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make a place called earth.

Or that life would arise. And that thinking beings would evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light and try to puzzle out what had sent it on it's way.

And after the earth dies, some five billion years from now... after it is burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the sun, there will be other worlds. And other stars, and galaxies coming into being.

And they will know nothing of a place once called earth.

_________________In the absence of God, I found Man.-Guillermo Del Torro

Have you tried that? Looking for answers? Or have you been content to be terrified of a thing you know nothing about?

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?

Confidence being an expectation built on past experience, evidence and extrapolation to the future. Faith being an expectation held in defiance of past experience and evidence.

Galileo stood outside the court and said, "And still it moves,..." after being forced to capitulate.

Pat Robertson sat on tv and said that one can, "calm the storm," with prayer. He was referring to the recent outbreak of tornadoes that, according to him, were the result of not enough people praying.

People believe what they want to believe, I guess.

When some evangelist heals Stephen Hawking, I suppose I'll have to rethink things a bit. Until then, I'm firmly on the side of the critically thinking skeptic. I see no reason to spend time and money chasing an ever receding horizon.

Ant, Madscribbler is not misrepresenting history, but recounting a popular legend that gets to the heart of Galileo's conflict with the church. You do not know Galileo did not say it, so you have no basis to dispute the legend. At least Galileo was a real person, unlike Jesus, and this myth helps to illustrate modern defiance against the flat earth idiocy of the medieval church.

here's Richard Feynman's famous 7 lectures on the character of physical law.

Not science promotion, in the way some of these other videos are, but lectures by one of the true explorers of the world. If you are even remotely interested in physics, or science more generally, you should watch these videos.

Feynman has a particular skill in presenting these concepts in strait forward language that really takes you into the concepts he discusses.

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